Beginnings and Ends (Short Story) (2 page)

Because that’s what I always do
.

That’s who I am. That’s what I’ve become
.

As we descend to the private level of the parking garage, I find myself thinking about Tommy
.

I wonder what he’ll think when he hears the “happy” news
.

Boston, present day

The first thing that Jules Cassidy did whenever he came home from work was to secure his sidearm in the lockbox he kept in his home office.

The second thing he did was search for his husband, Robin. This evening he found him up in their bedroom, lying facedown on their bed, his jacket still on, fast asleep.

Robin’s character was having a really rough week.

The good news was that
Shadowland
, the Art-Urban-written-and-directed series in which Robin played a closeted gay A-list actor named Joe Laughlin, was a bigger hit than ever.

The bad news was that playing Joe for all these years had sucked the energy out of Robin. Yes, it was a wonderful, challenging role. And yes, Robin was brilliant, giving a nuanced performance that got him Emmy and Golden Globe noms galore.

But slipping inside the skin of an alcoholic, substance-abusing, self-loathing, fear-driven, craven man was not the easiest thing for Robin to do, day after day, year after year. Particularly when Joe was on a downward spiral.

Joe’s manager was urging the actor to get married to some female starlet, to quash some rumors that weren’t really rumors at all.

Jules checked the clock on the bedside table—it was barely 1830.

Even though the idea of peeling off Robin’s boots, jacket, and jeans, and then shucking off his own suit and just crawling into bed with his husband was tempting, Jules had skipped lunch.

His stomach growled loudly as if in preemptive protest—so loudly, in fact, that Robin awoke.

The lack of recognition in his eyes as he lifted his head would’ve been weird, had Jules not witnessed it before. Robin had gotten so deeply inside of his character that now, in that cloudy place between waking and sleep, it was Joe Laughlin who was looking back at Jules.

But Joe didn’t stick around for long. It was really just a fraction of a fraction of a second before Robin returned. And tired as he was, he managed to smile at Jules with genuine pleasure. “Hey, babe. Did you come home for lunch, too?”

“Uh-oh,” Jules said, taking off his tie and kicking off his black FBI shoes, eager to put on his sneakers. “I hope you weren’t needed back on set.”

“No, I have the afternoon off,” Robin said, missing Jules’s verb tense. But then he saw what time it was. “
Had
the afternoon off.” He flopped back over, onto his back. “Oh, crap, I was going to do the laundry—have it all done by the time you got home.”

“We can pay people to do the laundry,” Jules pointed out. “Whereas paying someone to sleep for you …? That’s not likely to make you any less tired, sweetie. You’ve gotta do that for yourself. So, good job.”

“But I
like
doing the laundry,” Robin protested weakly from beneath the arm that he’d thrown across his eyes. He made an exasperated sound. “I was going to cook dinner, too, have it ready when you got home.”

Jules sighed as he went into their enormous walk-in closet to hang up his suit. “You really don’t have to do penance for the things Joe says and does.”

Robin was silent, back in the bedroom.

“You know,” Jules continued, raising his voice a bit so Robin could hear him, “it’s been a while since you’ve gone to a meeting.” As a recovering alcoholic, when Robin first got out of rehab, he’d attended one and sometimes two AA meetings a day.

Again there was silence before Robin finally spoke. “I do know,” he called back. “But the idea of you having to go with me, to have to take your weapon back out of the lockbox just because I might need protecting—”

“That’s not a problem,” Jules interrupted him.

“I know,” Robin said again. “But you’re tired, too.”

“Also not a problem.”

Robin appeared in the doorway to the closet, still wearing his jacket as he leaned wearily against the frame. “God, I just can’t get warm today. What is
wrong
with me?” He shivered a little, crossing his arms as he watched Jules pull on a pair of jeans, fasten the button at the waist, then zip. Robin’s hair—blond this week—was charmingly, adorably messed, but his face still looked tired despite his lengthy nap.

And his blue eyes were haunted.

“What makes you … bring up my going to a meeting tonight?” he continued.

Jules shook his head and shrugged. “No reason. I just thought it might help.”

Robin nodded. “Tonight … I might need help,” he said.

Jules didn’t hesitate. He reached for his shoulder holster, which he’d hung on its hook on the wall. “Then let’s do it.”

But Robin caught his wrist. “Something bad happened today,” he admitted when Jules turned to look at him. He released Jules’s arm and ran both hands through his hair, which made it stand up even more. “On set.”

And okay. Those were not words that Jules wanted to hear. Not tonight—not ever. But there was one thing in life that he didn’t doubt—and that was that Robin loved him.
Loved
him.

Jules exhaled hard. And made himself inhale after. Breathing was good. He managed to make his voice light. “What did Joe do this time?”

Robin laughed his disdain and frustration as he hugged himself again, rubbing his arms for added warmth. “This wasn’t Joe. This was—God, I can’t even blame the PA, because he’s new and he honestly didn’t know. And I can’t stop thinking about it—or the fact that I probably should have called you right away, right when it happened. And my coming home and just sleeping away the entire afternoon is freaking me out, and I wish I
could
go to a meeting and talk about it, but I can’t—not without being afraid that everything I say is going to show up in the tabloids tomorrow, unless they restrict the meeting to only those people I trust, and I can’t ask them to do that, because AA
has
to be open to everyone, and
that’s
not even touching on the fact that it’s a pretty major problem for everyone else in the meeting when there’s an armed FBI agent in the back of the room. It kinda deals a death blow to the whole anonymity thing and—”

Jules interrupted his rant. “Why don’t you start with the bad thing that happened,” he suggested. “With the … new PA …?”

Robin looked up from his misery, and his eyes were very, very blue and surprised. “Oh, shit,” he said. “You think—No! Jesus! God, Jules, no! That’s not … The new PA—his name is Grant, and he’s, like, twelve years old and completely clueless, and totally king-of-dungeons-and-dragons het, by the way. But when Enastacia gave him the job of refilling the whiskey bottles on set, he didn’t use tea. He used …”

“Real whiskey,” Jules finished for Robin. Oh, shit.

“In the scene we filmed …,” Robin told Jules. “It was in Richie’s office, and my blocking was to pick up the bottle and chug from it, you know? I don’t use a glass—if I had, I would’ve smelled it.”

Richie West was Joe Laughlin’s ridiculously smarmy manager, and they were no doubt arguing about his suggestion that Joe marry the starlet he was currently “dating.” Jules hadn’t read this week’s shooting script, but he knew the story was moving in that direction.

“How much did you drink?” Jules asked, working to keep his voice even, because WTF? If it wasn’t clueless Grant’s fault—and Jules could argue about
that
—then it certainly was Enastacia’s. How had something like this happened?

But Robin was shaking his head. “I didn’t,” he said. “Drink. I spit it out. All over Quincy and the set.”

Jesus, that was a relief, except … “Uh-oh,” Jules said. Mark Quincy, who was a raging diva, played Richie.

“No, Quince was great about it,” Robin told him earnestly. “He realized, right away, what had happened. I mean, it was all over him, so he could smell it, too. He had a bottle of water in his desk drawer, and he helped me rinse out my mouth while everyone else was just standing there, like idiots, with their thumbs up their asses.”

This wouldn’t’ve happened if Dolphina had been there. But Robin and Jules’s incredibly efficient personal assistant was on vacation this week. She and her husband, Will, had gone camping. Which was still a little surreal to imagine. Dolphina, in a tent, cooking over an open fire, wearing boots instead of heels, her Bollywood-perfect hair pulled back in a ponytail threaded through the back of a Red Sox baseball cap …

Robin was thinking close to the same thing. “Dolphina’s never going to take another day off,” he said with a sigh.

“Dolphina will be fine,” Jules told him. “Let’s focus right now on you. What do you need? How can I help?”
You should have called me, right when it happened
. Not the best way to express
that
sentiment. He adjusted. “I wish you’d called me.”

Robin nodded. “I wish I had, too. But I knew you had that big meeting at the State House, and I just kept trying to convince myself that it wasn’t that huge of a deal.”

And even though it wasn’t as huge of a deal as it would have been had Robin actually swallowed the whiskey, it was still something. Recovering alcoholics made a point to never even use mouthwash that contained alcohol, because it could be absorbed through their skin. Robin stayed away from hair care products made with alcohol for the very same reason.

“What do you want to do? How can I help?” Jules asked again.

“I’m weirded out that I slept so long this afternoon,” Robin admitted. “Shades of passing out.”

“You know that I’m not qualified as an expert,” Jules said, “but it seems really unlikely that you absorbed enough alcohol to—”

“I know,” Robin said. “I do. It’s just what I’m feeling.” He sighed. “I don’t really know what I want to do. I mean, I know that I want you to kiss me, but I always want you to—”

Jules kissed him. Long and hard and hot, his tongue in Robin’s mouth, his arms wrapped around him as he pushed this man whom he loved more than life itself clear out of the closet, until Robin’s back hit the bedroom wall.

And there they were, both breathing hard, chest against chest, hips against hips, as Jules stared up into Robin’s beautiful eyes.

“Does this help? Exorcise some demons?” Jules murmured, even though he already knew the answer. He didn’t wait for Robin to respond. He just kissed him again.

Robin’s reply was to shuck off his jacket and reach between them to unfasten Jules’s pants even as he kissed him back.

He couldn’t taste any alcohol—of course the incident had happened hours ago. Still, all Jules could taste was Robin—his desire curiously mixed with his anxiety and fear.

And he knew in that instant that, as diverting as some rough-and-tumble sex was going to be, there were some things that Robin had to hear first.

So he stopped kissing him and put his own hand on top of Robin’s. He couldn’t quite bring himself to grab Robin’s wrist and pull his hand away—he loved Robin’s touch too much for that. But he did manage to make Robin stop stroking him as he said, “This is going to be okay. You know that, right? That whatever happens, I’m going to be right here, beside you. Always.”

Robin nodded because he knew that, but the emotion and vulnerability in his face took Jules’s breath away.

“Whatever you want to do,” Jules continued quietly, “we’ll do it. You want to go talk to Dr. Everly, at the rehab center? We can do that. You want to be monitored, to make sure the alcohol that
did
get in your system isn’t somehow messing you up, we’ll do that, too. You want me to stay with you around the clock for the next few days, so that there’s absolutely no chance of you somehow, I don’t
know, slipping … I’ll be right here, although I honestly don’t think you need that. You’re one of the strongest men I know.”

Robin smiled at that. “Somewhere a few dozen Navy SEALs are bristling with indignation.”

Jules smiled back at him. “Not the ones who know you,” he countered. “The ones who know you would agree with me.”

“How did I get so fucking lucky?” Robin whispered, and despite Jules’s hand still covering his own, he resumed his motion. But more gently this time—a slow slide down Jules’s entire length and back, Robin’s fingers warm against him, tight but not too tight. Touching Jules exactly the way he liked to be touched.

Robin leaned down to kiss Jules sweetly, almost reverently, on the mouth, and Jules laughed because he knew Robin well enough to know exactly what that look in his eyes meant, exactly where this was heading. “I thought we were exorcising demons,” he said as, sure enough, Robin released him, but only to turn them both so that it was now Jules whose back was against the wall.

“Didn’t you just promise you’d do whatever I want?” Robin’s smile was beautiful as he sank down to his knees, dragging Jules’s jeans and his shorts down his thighs as he kissed him and caressed him and God, Jules was glad he had the wall to help hold him up. He sank his fingers into the softness of Robin’s hair as he closed his eyes and fought his body’s need for an immediate release.

And even though Robin had called himself
lucky
, it was Jules who was just that, because he knew, without a doubt, that his husband honestly loved what he was doing, even though it seemed lopsided in terms of give and take. Jules knew
that if Robin had his way, he would greet Jules exactly like this, every time they spent more than an hour apart.

For the first few months of their relationship, Jules had pointed out that it was entirely possible for him to use his mouth, too, in equally creative ways. And as enormously as Robin enjoyed those gymnastics, it soon became clear that he loved it just as much—and quite possibly even more—when he knelt just like this before him, while Jules used his mouth only to speak.

“God, I love you,” he managed to say now, all in a rush, because he was too damn close to being unable to utter even a poorly enunciated variation on the word
yes
.

Of course, Robin loved
that
, as well. A big part of the turn-on, Jules knew because Robin had told him, was watching Jules come undone. And yeah, when it came to their relationship,
Jules
was definitely the lucky one.